In my struggle to populate the pilot-unix team with some really
cool tools and ideas, I came up with yet another one.
I went to CompUSA in San Bruno the other day, looking to drop some
coin on some toys for my trip to NC, and picked up a Seiko SmartPad. Very
cool device (though it needs some design work in the Palm-fastening area).
Basically for those that have never seen or used one, it's similar
in size to one of those DayRunner zippered planners, without the binder
and pages. On the left side when opened are two velcro strips where you
stick your palm (since I use the Rand GPS and Minstrel, I couldn't use
velcro, so I just kinda plopped my Palm on the left side and let it bounce
around in there. They should have used small right-angle "posts" which
click into the stylus rails instead of velcro). It's got a little elastic
loop for the pen (more on this in a sec), and two other little pockets.
One is the pefect size for my Radio Shack digital voice recorder, and the
other holds a clip with extra pen stylii and ink. I'll drop some pics of
it's innards on my webserver in a few days.
The "pen" is actually a telemetry device. it's got a AAAA battery
in it (yes, quadruple A) and is nice and thick. When you uncap it, you see
an ink end, and when you press the cap on the "butt" of the pen, it
presses a spring inside the cap which reveals a small stylus nub on the
top. Now you're holding a telemetric pen with ink on one end, stylus on
the other.
On the right side of the zippered 'folio is a small lined paper
pad. Underneath this pad is a nice hard plastic "backing". You load up a
few apps on the Palm side (eTODO, eAddress, eMemo, and eCalendar, and
supporting trap patches) and run them just like Memo/etc. They look and
feel the same, except they have a little toggle on the bottom for "Include
Ink". If you begin writing on the pad (when you press to write, the "ink"
side of the pen pushes in less than 1mm, and turns on the connection) the
writing goes to the Palm over IR, and is captured in a zoomable "ink"
record, which is attached to the TODO/Memo/etc. It's quite accurate.
Once you sync your Palm to your desktop (assuming you've installed
the Seiko SmartPad software under (pfft!) Windows), the data is replicated
in a version of their own Palm Desktop suite.
You can email these "ink" images and records including them as
attachments to a user as an EFD format file (??) or as a GIF (arg,
royalties). Clearly I would love to play around with a desktop version of
this data on the linux side of things.
So... add this to the growing conduit list. I'm going to contact
them with the idea of helping us support their Pad under linux. I could
probably whip up a desktop that matched theirs pretty quickly in Perl::Tk
(ala XPalm Desktop), but that's not the best. (JPilot again? =) We have
our choice of tools for this: gtk+, Qt, wxWindows, fltk, Java.
Does anyone else have this pad? Wanna team up for some hacking?
/d
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